1st February 2010
When we bought our tickets for the IMAX, we got some reduced price tickets for the Melbourne Museum at the same time so this morning we decided to check it out. The museum is housed in a modern building, full of natural light across a wide open plaza from the Royal Exhibition Building.
The first thing you see as you enter the museum is the skeleton of a junior blue pigmy whale, the largest living mammal on the planet, right next to this is a pair of 12 metre long pythons. We continued towards the Wild exhibition through the dinosaur walk, charting the lives of the various dinosaurs right up to the Australian megafauna, thought to be the distant relatives of todays crocodiles.
The Wild exhibition contains exhibits of most of the living creatures on the planet. This is an interactive exhibit, using quite a bit of technology such as the ability to touch a picture of the animal and get a pop-up with information on it and view finder type machines where you point it at a section of the display and touch the animal to get more information. The information also tells you whether the creature is endangered or not. A really excellent way of getting the information across.
After the Wild exhibition, we took a tour of the museum with one of the volunteer guides. This took us to all the major parts of the museum with explanations as to what each contained. A sort of overview so people could decide what they wanted to go back to and a very good introduction to the museum.
Following the tour we went into the Forest Gallery, a living forest planted within the museum and containing live birds such as Satin Bowerbirds and animals and charting the progress of the forests from the beech forests of Gondwanaland to today’s eucalypt bush. It also contained some burnt trees as a reminder of the ever present threat of fire and a chimney stack in remembrance of the 173 people who died in the Black Saturday bush fires in Melbourne 12 months ago.
Next we checked out the Bugs Alive exhibit, which also contained (millions) of live specimens such as green ants, redback spiders, huntsmen, tarantulas, scorpions and a thorney devil enjoying a meal of ants. It was a real eye-opener and good to know what these mostly deadly things look like especially in view of our impending outback trip.
When I started to work for myself a lunchtime ritual quickly established itself where everything stopped for neighbours. It’s the only thing I break for all day and if I miss it, Ed knows I’m really snowed under with work. So, on our visit to Melbourne this was always going to be one of those ‘must-do’ things. Along with Ed and our mate from Reading, Andy (safety in numbers) who was also keen to do the tour, we caught the tour bus from the Neighbours centre.
Our guide warned us that this would be the cheesiest tour we would do in Australia and it certainly was. We started by watching the fateful episode where Toady marries his true love, Dee just before she drowns in a car accident on their way to their honeymoon. Fabulous for me since this was one episode I had previously missed. The rest of the journey to the Neighbours set was filled with fascinating facts about Neighbours past and present from our friendly tour guide.
When we got to the suburb where the Neighbours studios are, which is about an hour outside central Melbourne, the tour guide took us around all the outside locations used in the program. Although they use the local school and hospital for outside shots, all the inside shots of these places are shot in the studio. The same for the famous street itself, all the insides of the houses are off limits for the crew and cast and the inside shots are all filmed in the studio.
Next we stopped on the Neighbours lot at the small building they use as the Erinsborough News or Police Station depending on which sign is showing. Here we got off the bus for a photo op, outside the Erinsborough News Offices. While we were here, Scott Major who plays Lucas on the show came down for some behind the scenes gossip and photos. I also got his autograph in my travelling diary. Cheese city!
The tour’s final stop was the famous Ramsey Street itself. The residents get paid compensation by the production company for allowing them to use their street and there is also a security guard present at all times to prevent mad fans doing weird stuff in the street. It was weird to see all the houses I know so well and to realise that they are completely different inside to what I imagine them to be. Some more cheesy photographs before a farewell to Neighbours and the bus journey home accompanied by a documentary about the best soap in the world ever. Thoroughly cheesed out.
